third time's a charm

As you may remember, one of my resolutions was to finally knit a sweater for myself. I decided that I needed a little help to keep me on task with this resolution, so I joined a group on Ravelry whose members had the goal of knitting one sweater per month in 2010. With a group like that, I figured odds were good that I would get at least one sweater done. I am nothing if not an overachiever in the crazy department.

So I continued to work on my Vine Lace Cardigan, which I did end up taking with me to New Orleans. Progress was good; I was all the way down the first sleeve; then I noticed that I was missing some stitches. I assumed that was the reason the sleeve was a little tight on my chubby muscular upper arm. Rats. I ripped back, added the necessary stitches, re-knit the sleeve, and tried it on. Still too small... and then it hit me. I pulled out a ruler to confirm it -- yep. My gauge was off. When I checked all the notes on Ravelry, I found that no one else had managed to get gauge with this sweater. (And NO, I had not done a gauge swatch, either.) In short, I, and by extension, the sweater, were screwed, because no matter what I did, this sweater was going to be too small.

Wanna know the fastest, easiest way to frog a sweater?


Use a ball winder. Fifteen or so hours of work were history in about five minutes.

That was January 19. On January 20, I decided that I would simply take a different tack, and switch to the cotton sweater that I had been working on over the summer. I won't need it for a few months yet, but at least it will be done!

I worked on that one for two days, before I realized that I didn't have enough yarn to finish the project, since I was knitting with a double strand to solve that gauge problem. The yarn has been discontinued; I did find someone willing to part with it, but she couldn't ship it until this week. Beggars with half-finished sweaters cannot be ungrateful complainers, so now that sweater was out.

I stewed for a few days. People on the sweater-a-month group urged me not to give up. I had pretty much put myself on the bi-monthly sweater plan.

Then a sweater pattern kept bubbling to the forefront of my attention. In various guises and ways, the Shalom Cardigan appeared over and over again. I took a second and third and fourth look; I read every modification made to the pattern BEFORE I started (as the original one was written for a six foot tall person with a 32" bust, a far cry from my own dimensions); and on January 26 I picked up the yarn I needed from my LYS and cast on. And knit and knit and knit for the next five days, hence the lack of blog posts. I didn't even list the project in my Ravelry notebook, for fear that I would jinx myself yet again.

But I finished on January 31. I was greatly assisted by the fact that this pattern does not have any seaming, or even sleeves for that matter, just buttons to sew on and ends to weave in.



I redid the bottom garter stitch band today to make it hang more evenly, and washed and blocked it. It's drying now; I'll post less blurry pictures once it's done. In the meantime, I am going to get some sleep, and think about my February sweater.